DesignIssues: Volume 33, Number 1 Winter 2017 3 © 2017 Massachusetts Institute of Technology Rhetorical Tools for Discovery and Amplification of Design Arguments Per Liljenberg Halstrøm A design process can be defined as a deliberative process about how to design persuasive artifacts. When designers during their design process argue for one way of creating a solution over oth- ers, this can be classified as an act of deliberative rhetoric, because they are seeking to persuade an audience about what to do. 1 The audience of this form of rhetoric may be fellow team members, clients, investors, users, or even the designers themselves when self-deliberating. 2 Rhetoric is particularly relevant to design studies and design practitioners. Buchanan claims that “the ability to explain is an integral part of practice: it enables the designer to judge the progress of work at each stage and persuade colleagues and clients that a particular design is effective in a given situation.” 3 In later writings, he took these rhetorical perspectives further. Not only the design process can be considered as a form of argumentation, but design products may also be perceived as instances of argumentation. Buchanan argued that if a product is “persuasive in the debate about how we should lead our lives, it is so because a designer has achieved a powerful and compell- ing balance of what is perceived to be useful, usable and desir- able.” 4 Correspondingly, we may perceive all products as “vivid arguments about how we should lead our lives.” 5 This means that rhetorical theory on argumentation is important to designers on two levels. The design process may be considered a process of argumentation, and the designed arti- facts themselves may be considered as arguments about how to lead our lives. 6 The relationship between rhetoric and design has been explored in many publications over the years. 7 As thorough as these studies are, they provide few concrete answers to how rhetorical theory may support practicing designers in develop- ing and reflecting on the actual arguments they make in the form of artifacts. If designers design arguments about how to lead our lives, then we must contend with the question of how to discover and judge such arguments. It resembles what Cicero considered to be at the core of argumentation, and what McKeon picked up on in writings on design as an architectonic art: “Invention is the art of doi: 10.1162/DESI_a_00422 1 Aristotle defined the genre of delibera- tive rhetoric to advise about what to do: Aristotle, On Rhetoric: A Theory of Civic Discourse, trans. George A. Kennedy (New York: Oxford University Press, 1991), 1358b. 2 Considering deliberation as a means to reflect on your own argument dates back to Isocrates. In modern rhetoric we also find descriptions of self-deliberation and being your own audience. See, for example, Chaïm Perelman and Lucien Olbrechts-Tyteca, The New Rhetoric: A Treatise on Argumentation, trans; John Wilkinson and Purcell Weaver (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 1969), 44; Kenneth Burke, A Rheto- ric of Motives (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1969), 37. 3 Richard Buchanan, “Myth and Maturity: Toward a New Order in the Decade of Design,” Design Issues 6, no. 2 (Spring 1990): 78. 4 Richard Buchanan, “Design and the New Rhetoric: Productive Arts in the Philoso- phy of Culture,” Philosophy and Rhetoric 34, no. 3 (2001): 198. 5 Buchanan, “Design and the New Rhetoric,” 194. For further writings on this argumentative perspective, see Richard Buchanan, “Declaration by Design: Rhetoric, Argument, and Demon- stration in Design Practice,” in Design Discourse. History. Theory. Criticism, ed. Victor Margolin (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1989), 91–110. 6 For writings on design and rhetorical genres, see Buchanan, “Declaration by Design,” 91–110; Per L. Halstrøm, “Design as Value Celebration: Rethinking Design Argumentation,” Design Issues 32, no. 4 (Autumn 2016): 40–51. 7 See, for example, Buchanan, “Declara- tion by Design,” 91–110; Buchanan, “Myth and Maturity,” 70–80; Richard Buchanan, “Rhetoric, Humanism, and